Waste management is a major challenge for many commercial livestock facilities, and this is particularly the case in confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) facilities. In CAFO facilities, livestock, such as cows, chickens, and swine, are housed in buildings. Animal waste including solid and liquid manure and urine, as well as other animal feeding and housing by-products that accumulate in the livestock buildings must be removed to maintain a healthy living environment. Most often, the waste is flushed from the livestock buildings with water creating environmental hazardous wastewater. Handling of this wastewater presents several different environmental challenges, including air contamination caused by the odor released by the waste, ground water and stream contamination from runoffs, and soil contamination, among others.
Commonly, the wastewater is collected and retained in large pits/lagoons. In the lagoons, the water and other volatiles are allowed to evaporate into the atmosphere leaving a watery sludge that accumulates at the bottom of the lagoon, which eventually requires disposal. Problems with this existing method include the requirement of large land areas for the lagoons, ground water contamination cause by waste leaking from the lagoons, stream contamination from lagoon runoff, air contamination caused by odors released by the waste contained in the lagoons, among others.
There have been attempts to reduce waste produced by the animals, eliminate storage lagoons, reduce storage lagoon size requirement, and reduce environmental impact of storage lagoons. These attempts include systems for reclaiming water from lagoons, air treatment for volatile emissions, lagoon covers to reduce volatile emissions, solid-liquid separation, and animal diet manipulation and/or chemical additives into the animal feed, among others. However, none of these systems or methods fully solve the many problems inherent with waste treatment.
Other problems facing livestock producers are the costs of a constant supply of fresh water for drinking and washing, the costs of land for spreading, the costs of lagoons and nuisance odor complaints. In addition, legislation continues to tighten for air and water discharge levels of pollutants including phosphorus and methane.
Accordingly, there is a need and a desire for an improved livestock wastewater treatment system and method that reduces the environmental footprint of a CAFO facility, and provides a source of fresh water, and reclaims waste solids and liquids for fertilizer. The present invention solves these and other problems.